Privacy Policies

This is about Facebook Principles. Facebook is free access social networking website. It is Privately owned and was founded in February 4, 2004 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The revenue of Faceboook was about 300 million USD in 2008.

These principles have been effective since November 26, 2008. Facebook is popular among people because it is good place to share information and keep up with friends. It is hard to say how many people have Facebook account but it is definitely in millions.

Facebook has two core principles; you should have control over your personal information and you should have access to the information others want to share. This means that Facebook helps people to share information with friends. Everybody can freely choose the information in his or her profile. Sharing information should be easy.

The policies include sections like; EU Safe Harbor Participation, The Information We Collect, Use of Information Obtained by Facebook, Sharing You Information with Third Parties, Security. Facebook is a licensee of the TRUSTe Privacy Program. After reading through the Policies some interesting facts came out. Facebook collects browser type and IP address from all users. They also store certain information from users browser by using cookies. Children under the age of 13 are not allowed to have Facebook account and Facebook does not want to have any connection with such a young people.

Facebook sais that Facebook Privacy Policy is designed to help you to understand how they collect and use the personal information people have decided to share. We have to say that these policies are not clear at all. After reading them through few times they still don’t make any sense. In the Facebook’s Privacy Policies, which is right after the Principles and the safe use of Facebook, they say that by using or accessing to Facebook you are accepting the practices described in this Privacy Policy. They know that hardly anyone will read those policies and naturally they want to make sure that these policies do concern everyone, also the ones that has not read the policies.

In 2008 Facebook announced that from there on they would own all the pictures that the users upload. However, the users of Facebook did not approve this matter and soon after announcement Facebook decided to take back the old principle.


The second site which we decided to take for our investigation is Microsoft. Naturally, millions of people around the world use Hotmail accounts, MSN instant messaging and other products of Microsoft. Therefore, it is important to understand privacy policy of Microsoft, as it concerns a large chunk of Internet users.

The privacy policy was updated in May 2008. The full version contains 15 headlines, including such issues as: Collection, Use and Sharing of Personal Information, Display of Advertising, Use of Cookies and Web Beakons and, finally, Changes to the Privacy Statement and contact information.

In general, all the headlines correspond to three main topics: Personal Information, Use of Information and Your Choices.

Personal information sections deal with collection and representation of users’ personal information. Microsoft admits it use cookies for users’ convenience. Interestingly, there is a section about Web Beakons, which is used mostly for collection of statistics, i.e. how many users visited certain pages. Furthermore, these “invisible gifs” can be included into promotional emails and newsletters. Microsoft also states that it can combine the collected personal information “with information obtained from other Microsoft services and other companies”. In other words, Microsoft reserves the right to create a complete profile of a user through employment of all affiliated web-sites and services. This statement leads u8s to think that, in fact, there is no privacy in the Internet at all.
“Use of Information” section highlights primarily how Microsoft can utilize the collected information. As usual, the company can inform about the products and services and send surveys. Microsoft assures users that it does not distribute any personal data to other companies. However, Microsoft can create assumingly “personalized” advertisements basing on the information users provide. In doing so, the company insert persistent cookie to user’s web browser to be able to identify which advertisements this particular user saw and subsequent users’ behaviour, as clicking on the ad.

The “Your Choice” section educate users how to make communication preferences. We found out the section quite useful, as it states how to opt-out from Display of Advertising, stop delivery of newsletters, for example.

All in all,

1. Privacy policy typically have information about the personal data which sites collect; usage, distribution and (un)disclosure of personal information to third parties or affiliated companies. Further, privacy policy has information about security (where emphasis is that customers are responsible for their own security) and age limits. Moreover, privacy policies have quite exte3nsive explanations of usage of cookies and other technical means to control users’ behaviour. The positive point is that privacy policies typically contain links to personal settings, when users can configure their preferences and thus strengthen personal privacy.

2. The obvious difference in privacy policies of two selected companies is the collection of IP addresses by Facebook. MSN, at least, do not have any statements about IP addresses. Facebook might collect IP addresses for extra security and to identify users in investigation if privacy policies were violated. However, in general, privacy policies are practically the same. The similarity of privacy policies is clear, because both sites operate as means of communication in the Internet and they face the same legal challenges. However, Facebook core’s principle of control over personal information by users themselves is states much clearer than in MSN’s policy. Again the explanation is that users share much more might-be confidential information, as photos and videos. It was interesting to know, that both Facebook and Microsoft are licensees of TRUSTe Privacy Programs.

3. We do no think the policies are clear to users. First of all, they are quite lengthy and require at least several attempts to read through them before you start understand the major points. Besides, the scope of privacy policies is very broad as they aim to cover all major aspects. Moreover, it requires users to have some basic knowledge about cookies, security (SSL) to understand technical specifications. From our subjective opinion, these policies are created with the company in mind, not with regard to users. It seems like the policies are too ambiguous and can be interpreted very freely, always to the benefit of the companies. Also, it might happen that the majority of users get frustrated with the length of the policies and do not read them to the end, so it might be easy to hide important information about usage of personal information, for instance.

Our suggestion that the policies should be written in more precise language and should strike the right balance between details and general information.